Count Obama’s whoppers from his BP speech.

There are lies, there are damned lies, and there’s Barack Obama. His presidential address to the nation regarding the BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak was filled with some big fibs.

Starting with:

“But make no mistake: We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. .. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

If the Obama administration is doing “whatever’s necessary,” then why has he not granted a waiver for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, “a protectionist law that requires vessels working in US waters be built in the US and be crewed by US workers”? The federal head of the cleanup effort, National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, has previously stated that there hasn’t been a need for this? Really? Tell that to the people of the Gulf coast. As Fox’s Brian Wilson explains, “But that [the foreign assistance currently used] is largely technology transferred to US vessels. Some of the best clean up ships – owned by Belgian, Dutch and the Norwegian firms are NOT being used.”

Even the typical cheerleader for liberal Democrats, Time Magazine, agreed that the refusal for help was bizarre. Also hurting Obama is that President George W. Bush waived the Jones Act during Katrina response, which perhaps explains why a recent poll of Louisianians found that Bush had higher ratings than Obama, including among 31% of Democrats polled.

It gets worse — the Dutch, for example, made a pair of offers of assistance. First to build the very sand berms along the Gulf coast like those Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindel requested from Obama. And second, sophisticated ships designed to filter oil from water via huge vacuum arms. Both offers were initially rejected. It’s, of course too late for the berms. The oil has arrived. But now, more than 50 days after the accident, the Obama administration has accepted the Dutch equipment, which works by sucking in oily water and pumping it back into the ocean after filtering.

What was the holdup? Apparently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.” Greg Yardale comments, “Get it? The EPA wouldn’t let them suck lots of oil out of the ocean because they would be returning small amounts of oil into the ocean.” Wow, and these bureaucratic types want to run your health care too!

And they said Bush was incompetent? Here are some numbers as to what the Dutch could have done on day 3 of the leak: “One ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels. 5,000 tons per day is 36,500 barrels per day. 4 skimmers have a capacity of 146,000 barrels per day. That is much greater than the high end estimate of the leak. The skimmers work best in calm water, which is the usual condition this time of year in the gulf.”

That’s just the first lie. Here’s the next:

Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource.”

It is? Can he offer some proof? The truth is not only can no scientist prove that oil is finite, but scientists aren’t even sure regarding the source of oil. Decades ago some scientists theorized it came from billions of years of dead things, thus “fossil fuels.” But that’s been largely disproved, particularly through a NASA discovery that found a moon of Saturn, Titan, made up of LPG, or liquefied petroleum gas. Gee, were there dinosaurs on Titan too? Hardly, say the discoverers. Titan, after all, averages temperatures of negative 180-degrees Centigrade.

“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan,” Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center told the NYT in 2005. If it’s geologic on Titan, it could be geologic on Earth as well. And if it’s geologic, that means oil could be perpetually produced for as long as the Earth’s core stays molten. (And even if it did come from dead things, are we to believe we used up 4+ billion years of dead things in just a century or so?)

No, rather the Peak Oil theory is based on the same scare-tactic politicization of science, central economic planning, and artificial scarcities as the population disaster of Thomas Malthus, or the current Climate Change fearmongering.

Back to the Fibber in Chief:

Obama: “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. “

This might be the most brazen of his lies, because the above statements are only true due to the direct interference by government and environmental extremists. The truth is we have no idea what our proven oil reserves are because the government and environmentalists forbid our energy companies the ability to explore and drill to the extent the market demands! The only reason these companies are attempting to drill 5,000 feet deep is because the government and environmentalists deny them the ability to drill in shallower water or on land. One word: ANWR!

More Obama: “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Here’s where the Crony Corporate machine — the strange bedfellows of government and corporation — effectively lie to even liberals: Those who drool at the mouth to get off oil and coal in order to stick it to the petroleum companies don’t realize that those same companies are poised to make grand profits off of Cap-and-Trade and similar schemes designed to punish carbon output and push “renewable” energy.

Because, as Michael Morris, the CEO of the largest national coal-burning utility, American Electric Power, told Forbes Magazine (without shame), the way the carbon trading schemes are organized the company gets to pass the entire cost of the regulation on to the consumers, padded for additional profit through “administrative” fees. The more it costs them the more they make. And the more you pay. [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Added Exelon’s John Rowe, “Exelon would gain simply because a price on carbon would raise the cost of production for fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Most of that would be passed on to customers, raising the wholesale price of power. Exelon’s revenues would rise, but its costs wouldn’t.” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Despicable, eh? All enabled by your president. It’s to be expected. The insurance companies helped craft his health care legislation, just as the “Trusts” of yesteryear co-authored legislation with Teddy Roosevelt regarding trust-busting and industrial regulation. They do this because the large companies can handle the costs while the nimble smaller companies must pack it in. You see, the one thing large corporations fear more than government is free-market competition. In this way, the federal government picks the winners and losers. By the way, the American consumer is always the loser.

Let’s wrap it up.

Obama: “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.”

Ah, the Democrats are always such Chinaphiles, aren’t they? Actually, this is just a half-truth by Obama. The full truth is that we import most of our oil from Mexico and Canada. In other words, our neighbors are happy to drill and sell us oil in territories where we could be doing the same. The full truth is that China is importing massive quantities of oil from countries like Iraq. Chinese companies (i.e., state-owned) are also attempting to purchase European-owned oil facilities operating in the Gulf of Mexico. China intends to drill in the Gulf even if we don’t.